


homesick

by rarmaster



Series: don't you worry child [13]
Category: Kingdom Hearts, Tales of Symphonia
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover Shenanigans, Gen, XC2 AU, both characters are an entire AU deep so they're probably unreconizable, but YWKON and FtPverse fans come get your food
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:20:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25105351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rarmaster/pseuds/rarmaster
Summary: Sora and Colette explore the dreamspace and talk about families, and homes.[DYWC]
Relationships: Sora & Colette
Series: don't you worry child [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1414204
Kudos: 7





	homesick

**Author's Note:**

> housekeeping 1: Colette is from YWKON, which is a ToS/XC2 AU. Colette is a blade, or rather, an Aegis, and doesn't adhere to ToS rules and quite frankly barely adheres to XC2 rules either.
> 
> housekeeping 2: Sora is from FtPverse, my big KH AU, so he's got different experiences from canon the same as Colette does. paddles my fucking boat around in this soup and hopefully you enjoy!
> 
> you can read a summary of the basic ftpverse/ywkon bits [here!](https://rarsneezes.dreamwidth.org/24351.html)

It’s bound to happen at some point, unless Colette keeps the port completely closed. Which, for the record she _isn’t_ going to do, because she’s hoping one of these times she’ll go to sleep and be within range of the network so she can get a hold of Martel or Mithos, and if not them then Zelos, please let her be able to talk to Zelos… Anyway, since the port to her dreamspace is going to remain open, then Sora stumbling into it one night is inevitable. Better to introduce him to it now than have him barge in when she’s talking with a fellow Aegis. ( _It has to be possible to contact them, somehow, eventually. She refuses to believe otherwise._ )

So when they stop for the night to sleep, Colette opens her dreamspace, and deliberately pings Sora.

She doesn’t have to wait long before he appears.

“What’s…” Sora begins, looking around. Already, beneath his feet, the hill under a tree that Colette paints habitually is shifting, grass giving away to sand, and then behind Sora, the ocean. The gentle sound of the waves renders itself with perfect clarity; the kind that can only be rendered by someone who knows that sound by heart. Sora blinks a few times, then turns to face Colette—standing under pink blossoms of the tree, fingers tracing the green scars on her pink core crystal, hair blowing in the breeze. Sora stares at her, haloed by the sun behind him set against a brilliant blue sky.

“Oh,” Sora says, his smile bright, if confused. “That’s—is this a dream? But I’m… lucid, aren’t I?”

Colette nods, once, polite. “You are,” she tells him. “This is the Aegis dreamspace. Since you’re driving me, you have access to it… I wanted to introduce you to it.”

“Oh, whoa,” Sora says. His eyes scan the scenery, where the beach meets the hill; somewhat patchwork, but Colette is already smoothing out the edges so it looks like one image instead of two different images meeting. There’s no need not to let Sora have the beach he painted—and painted with such ease, such attention to detail. It must be somewhere very familiar to him. It’s painted with that kind of warmth.

“This is neat,” Sora says, as he tests his toes in the sand, sighs slow and happy. “You know I—me and Kano could never share dreams, you know, but we had something like this. We called it the _heartspace._ Heartspace, dreamspace, same thing I guess?” He laughs.

And then he concentrates, and the dreamspace grows heavy with his wish, before releasing; a couch, rendered in warm brown cloth and a knitted quilt in blues hanging over the back of it. “Oh, it does work the same!” Sora laughs, and just like that the couch vanishes. He grins at Colette, and then seems to realize himself. “Oh—I’m not intruding, am I? I mean I guess you did just say you wanted to introduce me to this place but I know they’re kind of- I mean it’s not like it’s just _anything_ to—”

“It’s alright,” Colette interjects. The spike of Sora’s worry echoing in her core makes her warm. “I called you here, didn’t I?”

Sora scratches at the back of his head, still laughing. “That’s true,” he admits. And then he asks: “Is it normally just you in here? Or—you _and_ your driver, I guess…”

“And anyone else in the resonance loop with us,” Colette adds. “So if you ended up driving another blade…”

“Yeah, I don’t think I will?”

Colette can’t blame him, but: “If we meet my brother, I may ask you to,” she says, determined. It’s selfish of her, but she ignores the guilt that sings in her core. For Zelos, anything. “It’s… we just…”

She can’t quite put her fingers on the words, but Sora smiles at her, gentle and understanding; a sharp contrast to the rejection she was bracing herself for despite herself. “Ohh, you wanna be able to come in here with him, right? I get that,” Sora says. “I can do that for you.”

“You sure?” Colette asks, before she can stop herself. More people tell her yes and mean it now than ever, but…

“Of course!” Sora assures her, giving her a confident thumbs up. “I don’t think I get enough about being a driver that I’m gonna go find any old blade to pick up—but if its your brother, that’s a different story!”

“Thank you,” Colette says, and then so they don’t have to dwell on it, she adds: “Can we walk? I want to see this beach.”

“Oh, what?” Sora immediately goes back to being flustered. “It’s not—I mean it’s just my home, it’s not. I mean I guess it’s _not_ nothing…” He won’t look at Colette. But he’s grinning. “Sure, yeah, I missed the ocean anyways…” He mumbles, and he starts walking.

“The waves sound so peaceful,” Colette comments as she catches up to Sora.

“It’s weird not hearing them all the time, to be honest,” Sora admits. “But—yeah.” He pauses. “Actually, hey, if you- you _really_ wanna see my home, I should be able to get the whole play island, if that’s okay with you? This is just a stretch of it, but…”

Colette blinks. “I don’t mind,” she tells him, because she doesn’t, and frankly she wants to see what he’s capable of in here. Lloyd’s getting the hang of things, of course, but he usually lets Colette or Zelos paint whatever they want, so fine details are beyond him.

Sora, though?

The dreamspace tightens with his will, and Colette lets it. The grassy hill in the distance that she painted is brushed carefully away, and in its place—trees supporting a wooden treehouse, not a treehouse, a platform and _several walkways._ There’s a pier. A little hut. A smaller island with a tree that’s grown bent, connected to the larger one by a wooden walkway. The give of sand beneath her feels exactly like real sand does, and when she goes ahead and wills her shoes away so she can feel it against her bare feet, it’s… perfect.

A place could not be so lovingly rendered if it were not a place Sora had spent most his life growing up.

“Wow…” Colette says, awed. “This is incredible.”

“Yeah?” Sora asks, though his tone kind of suggests he knows it, and the humble kind of embarrassment sits in the emotion bleed between them, undercutting Colette’s awe. “It’s—I’ve had a lot of practice,” he hedges. “Making this place so me and Kano could hang out.”

Colette starts walking, wanting to explore the place and get a feel for it; if Sora hadn’t wanted her to, he wouldn’t have offered to construct it to begin with. But even though she’s exploring, she also has a question for Sora:

“Kano… that’s your boyfriend, right?” she asks, approaching the hut. She doesn’t really _need_ to ask, though—their names are carved into the wood of the hut, a heart around them, and… It makes fondness swell in Colette’s chest, at least until Sora’s embarrassment bleeds into her. The names vanish in a flicker, replaced by wood slightly-too-smooth.

“There’s a ladder in the hut up to that walkway, so we can get to the paopu tree island, if you want,” Sora says instead of answering immediately. “And, uh, yeah. He is.” Sora’s voice gets a little higher; looking at him wouldn’t prove anything since like Lloyd his skin is too dark to show a blush on his face, but Colette can taste the sappy warmth of Sora’s love for his boyfriend on the back of her tongue, anyway.

“You said you spent a lot of time with him here,” Colette continues, as she opens the door to the hut. Sure enough, there’s that ladder. She starts climbing it, thinking as she does that maybe it makes perfect sense Sora learned to render this place in such detail; on top of it being his home, he did it for someone he loves.

“Oh, yeah,” Sora agrees. He waits until Colette’s at the top of the ladder and on the ground again, then grabs a rung towards the middle of the ladder and just sort of… _launches_ himself up in one big jump. Something he could actually do in the real world? A feat aided by the liquid reality of the dreamspace? Colette isn’t sure. “I mentioned I shared a body with him before, right? I think I did when we were talking about resonance, seeing as it’s…”

“Kind of the same, right,” Colette finishes, with a smile.

“Yeah. Less intrusive, but similar.” Sora nods. “But yeah it was the only way I could see him face-to-face and- we weren’t even—” He cuts off, as if that makes his sentence any less obvious. “But I wanted to see him so I spent… probably more time than I should have in here, hanging out with him. Or, in _my_ heartspace. I can’t access it when I’m sleeping, though—or not access it _and_ get Kano in here—so I mostly spent a lot of time just. Meditating. To be here with him.”

He says it so easily, but towards the end he seems to have realized how much he’s said, and his embarrassment comes back to the edges of his smile.

“I get that,” Colette says, to head some of his embarrassment off. “This was the only place I could talk to Martel face-to-face for a long while, too.”

Sora scratches idly at his cheek. “Martel?” he asks. “You’ve mentioned her before, right? Sorry, I’m bad with names and there’s been so much to keep track off—”

Colette laughs. “No, it’s okay,” she tells him. “And, yeah, she…” Habitually, Colette’s fingers reach to trace the scars on her core crystal, the marks that prove she did share one with Martel for a while—a bastardization or not. Sora’s eyes trail to watch her fingers, but he doesn’t comment. “We were sharing a body for a while, too,” Colette says. “And it was pretty easy to swap off who was fronting so we could interact with other people, but interacting with each other…”

“You had to come here,” Sora finishes. And then, as he starts walking towards that smaller island with the bent tree: “Hey, when you’re done exploring the island, you should show me where you and Martel hung out.”

“We didn’t hang out anywhere in particular,” Colette counters. “Just wherever we felt like at the time. You can paint any kind of scenery you want, in here.”

“Ohhh…” Sora says, thoughtful. And by that point he’s close enough to hop up onto the bent tree, which he does, walking across it with the kind of confidence that must come from knowing this is the dreamspace. ( _She wonders if that ever trips him up, in the real world, smiles at the thought—then feels bad, because it’s at his expense._ ) “Well, before we keep talking, let me show you a Destiny Islands staple…”

And deftly, Sora hops up to pick one of the star-shaped fruit off the tree.

“…a paopu fruit!” He tosses it Colette’s way; she catches it with ease. “I wouldn’t recommend eating it though,” he warns her, almost immediately. “Food doesn’t taste right in here and—it’d probably go against the legend, anyway. But I got the feeling you wanted to know more about my home, so…”

He trails off. Colette turns the fruit over in her hand. It’s kind of squishy, but rendered with less precision. She wonders how often Sora has held one in his hands.

“What legend?” Colette asks, interested.

Sora keeps standing on the tree, one hand balancing his weight against the bent trunk: “They say if you share a paopu fruit with someone, your destinies become intertwined,” Sora recites, like he knows the legend by heart. He probably does.

“So that means you’ve shared one with Kano, right?”

Sora almost falls off the tree.

“Wh- I mean- no we…” The emotion bleed sings not just with embarrassment, but also something tight like longing. “It might as well be a marriage proposal,” Sora explains, nervous. “So we haven’t—not yet, you know. I mean I can’t imagine my life with anyone else, but we’re still… kids, you know? And I don’t know if he’s ready for…”

Sadness, along with the longing. Colette gently reminds herself how short human lifespans are. Sora’s younger than _Lloyd_ is, even…

“I was just teasing,” Colette says.

“Yeah, well.” Sora hops off the tree. “Since you’re teasing me, let me tease you—you got a boyfriend? Girlfriend? Someone?” And then, a second later: “Is it _Martel?_ ”

Colette laughs at the idea. “No, Martel’s my sister,” she says.

Sora whistles. “A brother and a sister? Big family.”

“Two brothers, actually,” Colette corrects. ( _And that’s not even counting all her cousins._ ) “And I _do_ have a boyfriend.”

“Oh yeah?”

Alright, Colette blushes. And unlike Sora, hers is plain to see on her face, pink glow only offset by how bright the sun is. “Lloyd,” she says. “He’s—Yeah.” She probably doesn’t need to explain _everything_ about him. It’s not like Sora’s said a _ton_ about Kano. But. “He’s my driver, too.” That means something.

“I thought you said you didn’t need a driver on your world, and that like, the system broke or whatever.”

Colette blushes harder. “Well, just because I don’t _need_ one doesn’t mean it’s not nice to share a resonance with someone, you know?”

Sora thinks it over, then nods. “Yeah, actually, I can see why it might be nice to share something like this with someone you love.” He grins at her, easy. It gets a bit sharper after a moment, though, and he waggles his eyebrows. “Hey, if we can get Pyra to drop of us on my world before she sends you home, you can always snag a paopu to share with him.”

“H- _hey!_ ” Colette protests, and drops the paopu she’s holding like it’s fire. It vanishes once it’s out of her hands—perks of the dreamspace.

“What! You got to tease me, it’s only fair.”

Colette doesn’t answer. Sora at least drops it quick, laughing and hopping into the ocean from the tree. He swims around the little island in strokes that immediately drown Colette’s embarrassment in her core with Sora’s own contentment—and, well, if he’s homesick, can she blame him? If taking a swim in a fabricated ocean sets him at ease, who is she to complain?

( _She wishes sometimes she had a physical place to call home._

_Not all the time, but._

_When you’re homesick for a person, it’s much harder to bear._ )

“Here, if you wanna see the race course, it’s this way!” Sora calls as he clambers back onto the shore to Colette’s left. He waves her to follow—looking completely dry; another perk of the dreamspace—and Colette goes to the edge of the bridge she’s on, gauges the distance to the ground even though it doesn’t actually _matter_ here. She hops down to join him.

Sora laughs once she’s next to him, suddenly nervous again. “I mean, if you don’t mind me dragging you all the way around my home, anyway; we can do yours next if you want?”

Ah.

“I don’t really…” Colette begins, but she _has_ a home, it’s not just really a physical place. “The place I grew up in wasn’t really a…” she tries instead, which isn’t even at all accurate ( _she didn’t grow up, she’s a blade_ ), but puts it in terms that are easier for a human to understand.

Sora’s laughter this time doesn’t feel so bright in her core.

“Sorry,” he’s apologizing, immediately—there’s a surprise coming off of him in the emotion bleed, as well as his shame. “It’s just; you always manage to find another way to remind me of Riku. It keeps surprising me.”

“Oh,” Colette says.

And that’s all she says, but:

“Sorry, sorry,” Sora is immediately saying. “I won’t pry. You wanna talk about something else? We could—you could tell me about Martel?”

His voice pitches in question, and it’s a fine question. She could talk about Martel, she really could, but her core _aches,_ the homesickness catching up to her, and it’s—It’s silly, it’s stupid, she has no right being jealous of _Sora_ because the ease to his homesickness is so easy, as simple as visiting his home in his dreams, so she’s not jealous but she is jealous and the fact that she shouldn’t be makes her sick and she’s _trying,_ she’s trying _so hard_ to be good—

Sora’s hands find hers, squeezing her fingers tightly. “Hey, Colette, hey, breathe.”

“Sorry.” Shame floods her core. Colette clenches her eyes shut and tries very hard not to cry.

“What? I think _I’m_ the one who should be apologizing—” His thumbs run over the back of her knuckles. “I don’t know what I said…”

“You’re fine,” Colette bites out. “You’re fine- I just—”

_I want to go home._

Sora breathes, deliberate and slow. “It’s okay, it’s okay, I get it,” he tells her, gentle and patient. “Just… stay here with me, okay, and if you need me to do anything, let me know. I know how to help Riku ‘n Namine through panic attacks but I know the thing we do is weird so just. I could count? Is that a thing?”

Colette could probably weather this fine without that, she doesn’t feel panicky she just feels _gross,_ but—Sora’s trying to help—and she’s not sure what else he’s meant to do, so—

“Up to seven, hold for three, down from seven,” she tells him.

“What? Oh! Counting, right, uh—”

“And Sora?”

“Mm?”

“The- the dreamspace- _please_ make sure it stays this island—”

( _If she has to see those white walls, that too-pristine bedroom, she might just lose it completely; and Sora doesn’t need to know about that. He doesn’t need to know._ )

“Oh, uh, sure,” Sora says. “I can do that. Okay. One—”

Colette grips Sora’s hands tight so he won’t let go of her, and breathes as he counts, until the coldness in her core thaws, until the despair clutching her core loosens its claws, until she doesn’t feel about ready to teeter off into a spiral of something horrible.

And when she opens her eyes, the beach is still there, and so is the sound of the waves beating against the shore. Sora’s watching her, concerned but patient and—the less she thinks about how much his smile reminds her of Lloyd, the better. Instead she pings the network, even if the network is well out of reach. But maybe Martel will see the ping, later, and… And Martel can help, somehow. Even if Colette can just _see_ Martel…

“What do you want to do now?” Sora asks, quiet, cautious. “I mean I can keep giving you a tour of the island if you want, got plenty of stupid stories about my friends if you want a distraction, or…?”

A distraction would be nice, but if she thinks about how homesick Sora isn’t versus how homesick she is, she’ll just spiral again, so.

“Can we just…” She drags Sora by the hand to the shoreline, sits down so she can bury her feet in the lapping waves. She pats the ground next to her for Sora to sit. He does. “Can you,” Colette begins, swallows. “Sit a little closer? Sorry. I just— I don’t want to be alone…”

“Sure, sure,” Sora says, and he scoots closer until their thighs are touching, grabs her hand in his and squeezes it. “This fine?” And he sounds confused, if agreeable.

Colette nods, embarrassed. Ducks her head down so her hair hides her face. The little, constantly touch-starved thing in Colette’s core sings with relief, but: “I just… if it’s weird for you, you don’t have t—”

“It’s okay!” Sora assures her. “I don’t mind.”

They sit in silence for a while.

And then Sora speaks.

“Tell me to shut up if you want, but… You miss your family, huh?” he asks.

Colette doesn’t look at him—she looks out to the horizon, and she breathes.

“I get it,” Sora continues. “I miss mine, too.”

“I’m not alone, though,” Colette counters. “ _You’re_ here. And you’re—you’re a pretty good friend.”

Sora shrugs in her peripheral vision. “Sure, but I’m not your boyfriend. I’m not your brother. It’s not the same.”

The shame in Colette’s core doesn’t stop, though. “I mean, it’s—”

“It’s okay,” Sora interjects. “Or, it’s okay if it’s not okay? It’s…” He goes quiet for a second, but the emotion bleed sings loudly with his reassurance, nudges of comfort slid across it. Colette drinks them in, though she still doesn’t look at her driver. “I’m here,” Sora says. “And it’s- it’s okay if that’s not enough. It really is. But I _am_ here. And if I can help, I will.”

Colette forgets how to breathe.

She doesn’t think anyone’s told her _it’s okay if that’s not enough_ before.

She’s learned to be selfish, learned to ask and to take, but she’s never _not_ had enough—not since meeting Martel, since meeting Lloyd.

( _Or, maybe Martel said something of the sort. About sharing a body. About how it wasn’t fair, and it was fine if Colette thought as much… still…_

_For someone who’s used to being told she’s asking too much…_

_Sora’s words just hit differently than Lloyd’s have ever before, despite how often he made it clear her desires were always, always reasonable._ )

Colette breathes again. The waves recede from the shore.

“Thank you,” she says.


End file.
